Fantastic interview. I have learned a ton that I had no idea about. This is the exact sort of Marxist-infused economic and geographic analysis that I want to do when I finally go to graduate school.

Very helpful interview for me. I've recently been studying the post-invasion history of Australian Aboriginal people, particularly in the post-war period, and come to the conclusion that automation/mechanization and deindustrialization coinciding with the Aboriginal struggle for land rights and self-determination contributed massively to their ultimate failure and the contemporary state of social collapse in Aboriginal communities. The pathologies of Aboriginal communities (violence, domestic violence, drug/alcohol abuse, suicide, mental illness, deaths of despair etc) are the same you find, for example, in the former coal mining towns of southwest Virginia that my family came from. During their period of high employment, the Aboriginal people of northern Australia were poorly paid, at rates well below their white counterparts, but often in work that required skill, demanded little assimilation to white culture, and allowed them to perform meaningful labor on their home country. By the 60s they began to demand autonomy and compensation for their dispossession. Many groups, for example the Gurindji people, whose men were highly skilled cowboys, dreamed of starting their own businesses on land that had been granted or leased to them. But by the time they had acquired the autonomy they desired, the Gurindji, who loved cattle work for the skill on horseback and relationship with country it provided, found that the cattle industry had moved on, that mustering cattle by helicopter outstripped horseback mustering in efficiency and made it impossible for their business to profit. The northern cattle industry had only ever been profitable at all because of the severely underpaid labor of Aboriginal people (goes to Philip's point about the exploitation inherent to the structure of many industries). This story, along with tangled and often indifferent bureaucracies, undercapitalization, and problems inherent to rural development played out in nearly every Aboriginal community in northern and central Australia. The unemployment rate for Aboriginal people is more than triple the general Australian population. In some states it's even higher. The despair and violence that Wang Huning witnessed in America played out even more intensely in Australia's remote Aboriginal communities, and for similar reasons: the disappearance from the north of industries that employed them as those industries modernized and rationalized, ensuing loss of purpose, boredom, compounded reflexively by the aforementioned social pathologies. There's a whole lot more to be said but I already feel the need to apologize for the long comment. Thank you, Varn

S-tier discussion on multiple different topics, thank you

Man this is a top ten Varn interview, second time listening

You can probably guess already but I can't wait for this to premiere. Really looking forward to it.

Man this was so good

Great work

Brilliant Work!!

The way he talks about Chinese policymakers seemingly looking to the Chinese equivalent of Reddit makes wonder if we should be occasionally looking at what is in the "Hot" sections of the policywonk corners of actual Reddit? What if the American economic policy people are doing similar and just nobody thought to check lol?

The idea of chinese reddit blew my mind, I'm flabbergasted

1:16:21 the current premier of New Brunswick is a retired engineer, would not recomend.

Sorry who is the person he keeps mentioning and sort of crediting for Socialism With Chinese Characteristics? I keep hearing something like maybe Xuei Mu Qiao? Is that it? Edit: it was Xue Muqiao.

surely the imposition of United States' interests in the middle east has shifted your position on multipolarity.